Dispelling Myths & Urban Legends

It's understandable enough that this myth came about, given the lyrics about tangerine trees, marmalade skies, a girl with kaleidoscope eyes, and other hallucinogenic images. But John Lennon, who actually wrote the words, always maintained that his son Julian came home from school with a drawing of the titular subject, and it was this enchanting artwork that inspired the song.

Now, to suggest that the lyrics were influenced by LSD is certainly not a stretch, since in the era of 1967's Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band , the Beatles were freshly under the spell of acid guru Timothy Leary, and even admitted to having taken acid for breakfast. But hell, I'll be a plasticine porter with a looking glass tie before I'll entertain the thought that the title is a code for LSD!

urban legends

Definition: A popular story, humorous, ironic or horrifying, and often taking the form of a cautionary tale, which varies in the telling but is always told as true, and usually attributed to a secondhand or thirdhand ("friend of a friend") source. Since the advent of the Internet, urban legends have spread like wildfire, giving rise to many websites that aim to both chronicle and debunk them.

Here are a couple:

Your cell phone can explode if you use it while filling up gas.

Several stories have appeared in newspapers in Australia, Canada and Indonesia about people using their cell phones while gassing up and being blown sky-high. None of the claims have ever been substantiated, however. But if there is no truth to it, why have cell phone makers such as Motorola and Nokia included warnings about not using cell phones around gas vapors, and why have cell phones been banned at many gas stations, including Chevron, Union 76 and Exxon?

It seems that after the stories started circulating in 1999, many companies started publishing warnings just to be safe. In August of 1999, Motorola representative David Rudd told the San Francisco Chronicle that his company issued the warning because of the remote possibility that a dislodged battery could cause a spark, not because of the transmission of radio signals, as popularly believed. Earlier that same year, Nokia spokesperson Megan Matthews told the Associated Press that although portable phones had been banned at the pumps in Europe for many years, the rules were from a bygone era when portable phones were more powerful than modern ones.

Although the bans are rarely enforced, it would be nice if, even out of fear, people gave us respite from their mindless chatter at the pumps.

Kentucky Fried Chicken changed its name to "KFC" because the genetically engineered organisms it serves are, according to the U.S. government, no longer "technically" chickens, so the company can't refer to them as such.

Both big corporations and genetically modified foods scare people, so this is an alluring urban legend. You'll hear that the so-called "chickens" are kept alive by tubes inserted into their bodies to pump blood and nutrients throughout their structure. You'll hear they have no beaks, no feathers and no feet. You'll hear that their bone structure has been dramatically shrunken to get more meat out of them. And all this in the name of streamlining operations and filling corporate coffers, right?

Wrong! First of all, KFC is in the restaurant business, not farming. Just as Nike doesn't grow its own rubber trees, KFC doesn't raise its own chickens — it buys them from suppliers, like everyone else. In 2000, KFC sold the equivalent of 736 million chickens worldwide. This kind of operation would require some pretty extensive farms!

Kentucky Fried Chicken changed its name in 1991 to KFC for three reasons: to de-emphasize chicken on a menu it planned to expand to include other products; to eliminate the word "Fried" from its title in an increasingly health-conscious society; and to jump on the bandwagon of companies abbreviating their names to acronyms, such as the International House of Pancakes (IHOP) and Howard Johnson's Hotels (HoJo). The acronyms create a new brand identity.

Check out www.kfc.com. They don't seem too reluctant to use the word chicken.